Is Generation X Ready to Take Over from Baby Boomers?

I am among the last of the Baby Boomers. That's right. As I approach middle age, I wonder what happened to Generation X, the generation that follows mine. The Baby Boomers are those who were born between 1946 and 1964, the period of time between the end of World War II and the beginning of Viet Nam.

Mine was the generation of rebellion, experimentation and discovery. We protested policy, danced to rock and roll and became the desired target of advertisers because we had money and love to spend it.

We saw heroes killed, presidents fall, and Americans put on trial. We promoted free love, experimented with drugs and broke with traditions. We Baby Boomers were the first generation to watch television, let our hair grow and question authority. We watched men walk on the moon and saw their brothers and sisters explode upon take-off from Earth as well as on their return.

In the novel "Moondust" by Andrew Smith, it is written that "Baby Boomers have the unique distinction of pissing off both their parents' and their children's generations." I agree that this would have been a possibility if we would have been parents to our children instead of their friends. Most of us simply pissed off, or at least disappointed, the generation of our parents. At the same time we've simply failed the generation of our offspring.

Yes, we wanted our children to have it better than we did when we were growing up. In our attempts to give them the things we never had, we gave them instead an overwhelming feeling of entitlement. We protected them from adversity and criticism and as a result, they can not deal with either. We made excuses for their lapses in judgment and failure to follow the rules. Because of that, our children don't know the importance of accepting responsibility or what constitutes character. When they got in trouble at school, the Baby Boomer parents marched right into the school and chastised principals and teachers for having the nerve to accuse or discipline our children. This created children that exhibit no respect for others.

Generation X is the first generation to be diagnosed with a disease that caused them to under perform or over act. They are promptly prescribed a pill that will supposedly treat their laziness, puberty, sloth, lack of interest and confusion. Today there are things called ADD, ADHD, OCD, BPD and a slew of different types of depression. Baby Boomers were just badly behaved, easily distracted, sad or moody. I wonder what we could have accomplished had we been diagnosed and properly medicated.

We Baby Boomers were the last generation to go out behind the barn and cut a switch because we mouthed off to our mothers. I always thought the actual act and time it took to go get the very instrument to be used for our correction was much worse than the physical part of the discipline. We remembered the entire episode the next time we thought about saying "Do the dishes yourself." The children belonging to Generation X would quickly remind us that charges will be filed or they'll suffer mental anquish if they are so much as verbally reprimanded.

We were the last generation to know the taste of a bar of soap for letting the new words we learned at school slip out during a tantrum. When we got in a fight, our parents stood by and made sure it was a fair fight and no one got more than a bloody nose, split lip or bruised eye. This is how we learned to take care of our own disagreements. More often than not it seems, Generation X resorted to lawsuits and drive-by shootings to settle a score. Although there hasn't been enough time to identify a trend with Generation Y, I fear it will be worse.

This is not intended to imply that the Baby Boomer generation was made up of saints and philanthropists. To the contrary, we are the generation of Charles Manson, Senator Joe McCarthy, Disco music, O.J. Simpson and women's lib. We were the Cuban Missile Crisis, Watergate and the assassinations of JFK, his brother, Robert, and Martin Luther King, Jr. We created Generation X.

This is intended to bring the Generation Xers to their senses. This is meant to prevent the snowball effect that could so easily result in the greatness this country has enjoyed, to be reduced to nothingness. This will hopefully incite someone, somewhere, to make a real effort to stop the madness.

In most cases, each individual is solely responsible for the amount of success they enjoy in their lives. The person in the mirror has the capacity to be extremely happy and productive. This is also true of the opposite. If you want, you can be as miserable and as big of a failure as you desire. You alone are responsible for where you are and where you are going, so quit blaming everyone and everything else.

The bottom line is this: It's no one's fault but your own, so accept responsibility. If you don't like where your life is, change it.